Bad Racist!

My friend recently mentioned that a colleague at work is bugging her by being a racist. Racists are funny creatures, especially workplace racists because despite plenty of equal opps policies in the UK, I think people can just be caught off guard by comments and find themselves wondering, ‘Was what that person just said okay? Was that a joke? Oh no, Wahid’s laughing, am I meant to laugh? It wasn’t funny, BAD RACIST!’ Plus, racists are often over sensitive about their racism being pointed out, which can make an awkward situation worse and leave the person who was trying to say ‘erm, not okay’ feeling like they’ve made the mistake. Plus, plus, we have technology to sort this kind of thing out now.

Arduino “is an open-source electronics prototyping platform based on flexible, easy-to-use hardware and software.” If you’ve never heard of it, welcome to the world of magic. This post is an example of the silly ways it can be used but it can be used to help monitor your plants and keep them watered, help your disabled father regain the ability to play guitar, or feed your cats. And, as what you are able to do with it is basically down to your imagination, there’s a lot of fun to be had. It’s fair to say that my imagination is somewhat limited by my wish that humans were more like dogs, but I’ve yet to let that hold me back from doodling evil genius ways to use arduino and here’s one I’d like to share with you.

The thought process:

Dogs bark and it can be really annoying. So annoying that my Aunt once adopted a dog that had had it’s voice box removed, can you IMAGINE?! Some dog owners should be put down but I’m going off the point. In extreme cases, owners and trainers resort to using something called citronella collars, each time the dogs bark the collar emits a puff of citronella spray. Dogs hate the smell and as such, they learn to stop barking. (N.B. These collars should only be used to stop certain types of barking, not all barking otherwise they’re just cruel.)

Can I just say, how trusting is the dog in that picture? Every single image I could find for citronella collars featured a golden retriever, the well behaved, trusting dopes.

Anywho, so my husband and I got chatting about ways to sort out this colleague and I was joking about the citronella collars, suggesting my pal just buy a big can of Febreze and then everytime her colleague said something she could leap at her and spray the Febreze in her face shouting ‘Bad Racist!’

While this might work, if you’re the kind of person who feels uncomfortable saying ‘erm, not okay’ then, this is unlikely to be the solution for you. But what might work better is a little arduino chucked into the mix.

You’ll have to excuse the lack of skill in these doodles, it never gets this complicated in Draw Something… Also, before you mention that ‘it’s’ should be ‘its’ I know but I need to get out the door and off to Birmingham for Talk About Local so I’m just going to have to trust that you the reader can get past this and any other sinful grammar errors in this post.

There’s an option here from Mr 337 on how the air freshener might be made. However, it’s a bit noisy, so I think I’d go for this one from the Instructables site, it looks as though it’d be quieter so your racist colleague would never suspect.

Instructables Arduino Air Freshener

So, that’s what I’d do if I had a problem colleague, some spare time, arduino and an air freshener. What would you do?

This isn’t about digital inclusion?

Recently I wrote about the way posts on the A Musing Hannah site will be labelled in future. If it is tagged ‘Blog’ then it’s likely to be relevant to digital inclusion. If it is tagged ‘Blag’ it’s anyone’s guess what it’ll be about because that’s going to be my fun and general interest section. Today’s is a blag post on arduino and hacking human behaviour (or just really annoying your racist colleagues).